Civ 5 – Best Ideology?

Just wondering what your favourite ideology is.

Personally I like Autocracy because Militarism, etc, help out with happiness sooo much, and with a large enough army Gunboat Diplomacy can easily get you a Diplomacy Victory.

What do you think?

I don’t really think there’s a best ideology. The Ideologies I feel are pretty well balanced for their tasks.

Freedom is great for setting up peaceful tall empires with their bonuses towards specialists. The freedom wonder help boost their power even further. Treaty organization is very good at maintaining alliances and space procurement is superior to spaceflight pioneers when at peace.

Freedom is not good at gearing up domination because all of its happiness gaining policies require significant infrastructure (banks, hospitals, specialist buildings) and only give +1 per building so it encourages playing peacefully.

Order is the direct opposite to freedom in that it’s good for wide empires. Order’s major bonuses are to production and it excels at building infrastructure. five year plan and skyscrapers makes getting buildings incredibly easy and worker’s facilities is excellent for migating the science penalty of having many cities.

Order also has some incredible happiness boosting policies like socalist realism (+2 to Monuments at tier one is HUGE) and young pioneers because they provide happiness to buildings you’ll probably want to build anyway. Order’s flaws are that it’s unique wonder is pretty shitty and it has no policies to help maintain alliances.

Autocracy is geared almost completely to domination. All of its policies encourage you to build a strong and powerful military in various ways. EX: building military related buildings (militarism, fortified borders), boosting the production of military units (mobilization, total war), making having a strong military more viable (nationalism, gunboat diplomacy) and making conquest easier (happiness boosting policies, police state, prora).

The main weakness of autocracy is its inflexibility. To make it work, you must be geared towards the military. This means when someone makes a domination victory impossible or someone smashes your military, you’re severely gimped.

Original Link – Continuation of discussion